


Flowers to Claudia

by great-pan-is-dead (technicolour_space_cadets)



Category: Interview With the Vampire (1994), Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Multi, References to Hamlet, References to Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24683494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/technicolour_space_cadets/pseuds/great-pan-is-dead
Summary: Louis reflects upon the flowers in the times she was there, and the many times when she is gone.
Relationships: Claudia & Lestat de Lioncourt, Claudia & Louis de Pointe du Lac, Lestat de Lioncourt/Louis de Pointe du Lac
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Flowers to Claudia

**Author's Note:**

> Written May 2016.

_Ophelia_

_"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance."_

Claudia’s eyes rested glasslike in her head, but her face smiled down at where he knelt.

_"Pray you love, remember."_

Her voice rang like the chime of glass, hollow of feeling. The voice of an angel, but no angel spoke those words. There was a wise snarling about them, a cackle of sweet bells.

_"I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died."_

Eyes cast suddenly across the room to Lestat then, and her voice took a sharp turn as she charmed the words like a snake. It forced a shudder through him, and terror instilled in his core then that thought he could not have felt from his little daughter, small and sweet but showing foreboding strength. That's when he should have known, truly. 

"Does it never trouble you?" Louis had mused, brow furrowed and eyes scouring the patterns that slithered on the carpet, where her dainty satin shoes had graced upon shortly before. "The way she acts, or rather, doesn't?"

"Why should it?" Lestat laughed back an answer, "So she's a bad actress! It has such a gothic charm to it."

"It's cold." He had consoled, "It's all she is, all she ever has been underneath."

"She rings like a bell, and is cold, ruthless, just as much as I, perhaps even more! So she knows how to be lethal, and it will do her good!"

"So none of that bothers you?"

"Not in hell, Louis. A martyr at your own hand as always." His words softened, trailed a hand around his shoulder, fingertips tracing brocade. "I would try teaching her a valid lesson or two, then. To recite is a valuable skill, to perform is something more. Tomorrow. There's always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow!" His voice picking up, and he left.

"I suppose I hoped too highly of you." Louis muttered to the door, in a room that was empty more often than not with the passing years.

  
  


The bodies found in the kitchen came the night after, and when they sought their daughter, found her engrossed still in her plays. All the while, Claudia had sat twining flowers amongst her skirts, twisting long stems through ribbons until a halo of fragrant heads bowed around her. Their heavy perfume danced with the fresh poignancy of curiously tangled branches of garden flowers in her golden hair, sweet weeds, balmy herbs. Lestat had frowned terribly at this curiosity until, as if to spite him, she began twirling around the room in disjointed steps, still reciting her lines. 

It continued until she decided her brook was to be the lace drapes; flourishing her arms as she drowned in white, Claudia sank laiden to the floor as they lay over her. But her heavy lidded eyes remained open, remained staring, and all the time it was at Lestat, until both nerves unwound. 

And so tomorrow never came. Lestat’s rage chewed at her macabre games, snapped at her whimsical fantasies. That had been the last time they had acted together, in a world of fading light, the horrors she began to unfold. Sometimes, with the door closed, Louis could still hear her enacting the great tragedies of the old world, and never once did he dare look.

  
  


_Violets_

Long after, through one of the many grimy nights weaving over the trails of Eastern Europe, she had left flowers on the worn oak washstand. It had been in the nights when the freedom was still fresh, but the new gnawing of his wistful reminiscence on their maker was also so. They had been drooping violets, wilting and decaying, turning pungent in shades of mauve, falling to a trance against the grain of the wood. In abhorrence, he had snatched them up and thrown them on the fire. They kindled in him the thought that she was, remembering, too; but not the way he was. 

Let everything be forgotten, everything turn to ashes, all but her and him, untouchable in the great dust plane of the earth. It was time to leave yet another place once again.

He’d thrown her things together within the hour, and at the bottom of Claudia’s trunk, fingers slid across some sharp slither, and withdrew in a few beads of red round something cracked. Neck jutting oddly, matted hair, a tangle of white porcelain and yellow yarn, a doll in the semblance of a monster that had been in the semblance of a father. The little shed blood of his own that trickled down the face like its own horrid tears. How his gut wrenched, with the little broken thing in his hands, all in dirtied and torn lace. Louis would not think on it, why she had chosen to bring the thing, but for all he hated it, could he bring himself to burn another? This is what was left in the end, flames that purified and tore him away from all he could not live with, in the hope one day they would take him also. He could not bring himself to weep into it; here estranged, in the lands where the rains were cold instead of the torrid heat of home, fragrant decades lost. Missing the close showers and shroud of whispers, the downpour now opened the vast expanse of the world, and the world was so empty.

He’d thrown it down into his own trunk in the end, and when it shattered further, and felt like he broke with it. 

  
  


_Drowned_

When she was gone he was blind to all he saw. He wondered if Lestat still lived, and if he had a home as they had, and if he could ever deserve one.

Louis remembered how he had not wished for his death, how he had not pursued loathing but liberty. There had been a longing. Had It been fulfilled? 

He had buried all in his life but her; there could be no burying her. He had wanted to drown with him, found the want of praying for the loved and lost and loathed that sank, and for his own wretched self, how monstrous it all was. 

_Forgive me, you have been dragged to a fate I sorely longed for, that you kept me from, and now I deliver it unto you._

There was no golden hair braided in pocket watches to whisper it to.

He wondered if what he had now was a home- with not a place but with Armand, but thought that if Armand was anything, he would never be a refuge. He was a gallery where all the paintings had the same eyes, a book to be read with the pages out of order. He was the art that Louis toiled to cling to, but it was a cold grasp, and for all they looked in the same direction, it was never at each other. They asked for nothing and gave nothing, a coexistence, but it was peace, it was not bitter, and it did not reminisce.

Reminisce of her.

If it was to be a betrayal of her, Louis did not think on it. Perhaps he had betrayed her the very moment they ever sat in that room together.

  
  


_Chrysanthemums_

The heads of the snow white flowers had meant death to her, and he could not bear them laden as they had been crushed round her skirts, laid on the poor withered thing they had sunk in the swamp. They were the moon, and her death had not been that. What more could be taken from it. 

It came keen to both of them when first entering the rooms on Royal Street once again how her presence still lingered, an echo that remained in the very bricks; the walls resonated of her. Louis was sure one night, to have heard Lestat alone whisper something to the room,

_“You have my forgiveness for the rest of binding eternity, I can only ask for yours.”_

He felt he should not have heard- but the love within him broke his heart.

The house still smelled of them, as though it had been stagnant for all the years they had been gone. They grew in the window boxes like weeds, sighing in the garden as graves. Louis did not pick them; the house belonged to the ghosts. 

  
  


_Brook_

Sometimes he thought of her in that small room, wretched and terrified, and wondered how Armand might have toyed with her mind. How she might have been spelled into complacence, acceptance… desire for her end. No, he can’t bear to think of those things. Things that rusted him away in the dark city years wandering alone without dire or drive. Holding only the weakest kind of strength; as one who cannot bear existence, but cannot bear to die. Too much past to die with, and too much past to live with. A past side by side with some not man nor boy who bled a confession he need not have given him. Louis knew, deep down, surely he had known. 

Relentless, he still thought of the dark and the small, and the time that elapsed, and of all the horrors she may have been put through. Her mind manipulated far beyond the twisted torment it already was. Armand might have had her walk the planes of hell and switched heads with the devil should he have wanted it. Never would he know what he did to her, and never could he forgive it. A sheet of water, oh so shallow, lay between their kinship and their ruin, neither daring to touch the surface, as by mutual command. And so Armand, old creature of fire and dust, had gotten what he had wanted; they both had. In that, it was Louis who also was the prey. Even as the years spread themselves in between and the wounds lost their heat, intrigue fought with repulsion, and neither won for very long.

Lestat knew he thought of her closing days. His tears were delicate, a consolation; a pain more in pain for Louis. The man in grief knew, as the other would put it, there was a Claudia-sized hole in his heart, in their arms, that was never to be filled again.

Of times mourning for her the two found Armand’s presence difficult. No less difficult to be with each other, although to be anywhere else would be impossible. In great efforts to cherish her life, lest one might not be able to bear the other, if only to lessen the chill of how she lived. It was for the best, he told Louis. 

Hopeless, it was, as neither would know the fears of their child, as it was them both who had led her into the water.

  
  


_Rosemary_

Louis had arranged them when he’d left, caring not for what he would think, but instead engrossing in the catharsis. 

Lestat at last returned from hunting, heavy fed and in a dazed blindness, nearly blundering, and cast his eyes over the display, at first he looked confused, mocking; almost as if he would laugh at something foolish that wasn’t understandable. Then angry, his lip curled up half to a snarl, but then infinitely and indefinitely sad.

_Sorrows come not in single spies, but in battalions._

The mantelpiece laden with its littering of fine leaves, a fragrance came to Louis again that could quicken his mind from drowning in the confusing abyss of it all. He found himself surrounded by all this, this that he saw and reminded him of all that was no longer there, all that he had lost. Here Lestat was, with the same golden hair, and he saw all that he had once had, all that he had gained. He reached out a hand to his shoulder, let his finger gently twine with the curls of his hair. The other found it in a slow turn of the head and searching of the eyes, seeking peace.

_"Rosemary, that's for remembrance."_


End file.
